This is a place for me to share some of my work. On this site you will find many examples of micro lessons. Many of them will take the form of 1 to 10 minutes video clips or short to the point articles. I believe that micro lessons could be a powerful tool that we can use with students. I hope that you enjoy this Blog site. This site will discuss educational technology as a tool for student learning. Site Publisher Fred Sharpsteen
email contact sharpstf@gmail.com

Saturday, November 30, 2013

The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don't much care where.

The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.

Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere.

The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

How it would read in Education in Wonderland

“School Teacher: Would you tell me, please, which way I should teach here?

The Cheshire School: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

School Teacher: I don't much care where.

The Cheshire School: Then it doesn't much matter which way you Teach.

School Teacher: ...So long as I get somewhere.

The Cheshire school: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you teach long enough and hard enough.”

But will you really get your students were they need to go! If you want to get them to achieve mastery of subject, then you need to have a plan where you are going to get there. Teach with purpose to get there.

a short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.

What is CoSN and what is the leadership role that they play in creating the leadership needed to move our organizations in the right direction as educational leaders.
This video has some dead air time for the first 9 Min. So you may want to skip ahead to the start of the conversation.

TEDxKC talk synopsis: Today a new medium of communication emerges every time somebody creates a new web application. Yet these developments are not without disruption and peril. Familiar long-standing institutions, organizations and traditions disappear or transform beyond recognition. And while new media bring with them new possibilities for openness, transparency, engagement and participation, they also bring new possibilities for surveillance, manipulation, distraction and control. Critical thinking, the old mainstay of higher education, is no longer enough to prepare our youth for this world. We must create learning environments that inspire a way of being-in-the-world in which they can harness and leverage this new media environment as well as recognize and actively examine, question and even re-create the (increasingly digital) structures that shape our world.

A few years back I was visiting Ferris State University and my long time friend Scott Thede show me how they were moving to Dashboards and Balanced Scorecards. Here is a summery of an article that will help us to understand what this means.

"Education leaders should take a page from the "balanced scorecard" approach that has reshaped how private- and public-sector firms have approached data and management.
Making Data-Driven Management a Reality
Today, even school districts routinely heralded as data-driven have rarely invested in the technology; hired the personnel; or developed the requisite expectations, feedback loops, analytic competencies, and accountability processes necessary for breakthrough management. Consequently, today many schools and systems are at the edge of their capacities when they seek to produce achievement data in a timely fashion.
This is a problem. We do not term a hospital "well-run" because its doctors use diagnostic tools. We would instead reserve that label for hospitals where staff were competent and efficient, supplies were carefully tracked and promptly refilled, data files were up-to-date, personnel needs were quickly handled, and so forth. Yet, in schooling, systems that have embraced only the most basic tenets of professional practice are deemed paragons of modern management.
What would it take for systems to start collecting data for breakthrough management? There are six steps. They form a rough hierarchy, so we will start with the most essential.

Step One: Accurate Collection of Basic Student, Financial, and HR Data. The first step for any organization is to collect the most fundamental data on what it does and how it spends its money. School systems are generally pretty good at this. Federal law now requires systems to test students and collect basic achievement data, while financial management requires districts to track spending, enrollment, attendance, and payroll.

Step Two: Data Linked across Time. Once districts have the initial building blocks, the key is to link them across time in order to determine how to improve performance. In general, a district that can collect its basic data accurately can also link them longitudinally. There are significant exceptions, however. Some systems do not maintain consistent identifiers across years for students or employees. One common problem is that organizational change is not accounted for in financial coding systems. Districts may assign costs only to offices (such as the Office of Instruction) and not functions (such as math professional development). The result is that when a district reshuffles its organizational chart, it cannot make comparisons over time.

Step Three: Customer Service and Satisfaction Data. Every company knows that its existence depends upon the satisfaction of its customers, and great companies measure customer service from several sources (internal and external) to diagnose potential problems quickly. Making such data managerially useful requires not just collection, but also ensuring that the data are routinely and systematically mapped onto processes and programs and analyzed.

Step Four: Data with Sufficient Granularity to Illuminate Units and Activities within Departments. Measuring efficiency and effectiveness requires measuring outputs and processes in units that are often overlooked. In regard to the role of HR, various measures might signal opportunities for improved productivity. Such measures might assess how long it takes an HR department to vet, interview, and hire or reject an applicant; how HR managers apportion their time; or the resulting quality and quantity of applicants. Typically, systems will know how much is spent on HR and the number of staff but not how much time the HR staff spends on recruitment or responding to the needs of teachers.

Step Five: Data Connected across Content Areas (and to Outcomes). Even if the efficiency of HR processes has improved and vacancies are filled more rapidly, more is needed to judge effectiveness. For instance, do the new teachers achieve better or worse student outcomes than the teachers that came before them? Do they stay longer? Answering these questions requires connecting the HR system data to student-level longitudinal test data to retention data to survey data. This level of data sophistication makes activity-based costing and cost-benefit analysis possible.

Step Six: Doing the Above in Real Time. Ideally, district management should be able to find out instantly which schools are waiting for textbooks or which teachers have received what professional development. Collecting and connecting these kinds of data allows school system leaders to determine which programs are cost-effective, how their system compares to others on a range of activities, and where they need to improve. Few or no school systems have all of these elements in place today. Most are currently at step two. Consultants or internal district analysts can--with enough time, manpower, and supplemental data collection--provide school systems with analyses that may push to steps four and five--usually on a project basis. Getting to step six is a whole new ballgame.

The Numbers We Need
So what kinds of data should systems report on a balanced scorecard? We identify six essential domains. Unfortunately, even those that have been an ostensible priority have been shortchanged by a focus on what elected officials demand rather than on what will help leaders improve schools.

Domain One: Tracking Student Outcomes. The most important measures are those tracking student outcomes. Just a decade ago, most districts had abysmal systems for tracking achievement and school completion. Today, most can provide coherent data on how well students are doing on state assessments, but outcome metrics beyond state assessments can be difficult to come by.Key data include:
Performance of students on various substrands (for example, number sense or spatial relations on the math test) of state tests with results accessible to the classroom teacher.
Item-level analysis at the individual student and classroom level. This allows teachers to analyze whether all or most of their students miss the same test items, and then to adjust their teaching strategies.
Employment or enrollment status of students after high school.

Domain Two: Tracking Students, Staff, and Inventory. Monitoring the number of students and teachers, facilities, and district assets provides important operational base lines. Systems have historically been good at tracking these kinds of data, largely because state and federal requirements led districts to configure their data systems accordingly. Unfortunately, there has been less success ensuring that these data are captured with sufficiently useful granularity or are matched with expenditures, programs, and outcomes. Key elements would include:
Authorized staff positions, the location of the positions, the purpose and reporting relationships of the positions, whether they are filled and by whom, and whether they are full or part time.
District assets and materials, where they are located, and the transfer of assets between locations (for example, the delivery of textbooks).
Students, which schools and classrooms they attend, and the teachers and staff in those classrooms. This should include not just the "teacher of record" for the students, but also aides, tutors, and other staff working with the students.

Domain Three: Finance. This is another case in which systems routinely track transactions but few have invested in tracking expenditures in ways that permit their impact to be assessed clearly. A management-friendly system for tracking expenditures would link dollars with programs, actual employee time, activities, and students. If a professional development coach or a gifted-and-talented teacher works at multiple locations, this should be readily trackable and linked to the teachers or students in question so cost-effectiveness can be assessed. Key questions rarely addressed well include:
Are dollars being spent in specific schools and classrooms or are they being spent by a central administration and then "allocated" to school sites based on calculations and projections?
Who decides which expenditures to make, and for whom does the expenditure take place? For instance, is a school-based professional development program purchased by the central office or by an individual principal?

Domain Four: Instructional and Curricular Operations. Instructional and curricular operations have received heightened attention as a focus on instructional leadership has led district leaders to devote more time to providing professional development and related resources. Nonetheless, there are few districts that collect and track instructional and curricular services in a manner that informs judgments about program efficacy and efficiency. Most tracking does not permit leaders to identify particularly effective tactics or personnel, or opportunities for cost savings. Key data should include:
What professional development is delivered to which personnel, when, for what length of time, and by whom.
What tutoring or afterschool programs are delivered to which students, when, for what length of time, and by whom.
Which reading programs and which math programs are used by which schools and how well they are implemented, at what cost, and with what results.

Domain Five: Human Capital Operations. More crucial than any other element of school-system management may be human capital operations. Dramatically improving the quality of teaching requires that a system be able to monitor personnel; gauge performance; and competently manage hiring, transfers, benefits, employee concerns, and termination. The key is to develop metrics that reflect meaningful organizational performance, such as:
The quantity of applicants for positions, how rapidly they are screened, and the rapidity with which successful applicants are placed and prepared.
The satisfaction of employees with the support and responsiveness of HR to various concerns.
The performance of personnel on various relevant metrics beyond student achievement (such as soliciting performance rankings of teachers by their principals and of other employees by their managers).

Domain Six: System Operation. Finally, it is essential to monitor business practices that facilitate system operation, such as procurement, IT, data management, and maintenance. The functioning of these elements is crucial to support school leaders, classroom educators, and school communities effectively. The key, again, is to measure these services not in terms of inputs but in terms of core metrics that accurately reflect performance. Key metrics would include:
How long it takes the district to process a supply request, how rapidly supplies are delivered to the classroom, and how the system's cost per order compares to benchmarks.
How rapidly school personnel are able to access the results of formative assessments, how satisfied they are with the user-friendliness of the data interface, and how intensively and extensively faculty make use of formative assessments and student data."

This is a summery from an AEI Article to help us understand what factors are needed in a Balanced Scorecard and for training technology people on what is needs to be understood in creating a system to help improve our system using all facets of our systems.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Streamed live on Nov 14, 2013
The second Book Club 106 conversation for Mindset, covering chapters 3 and 4. We talk about whether the author has gown too far in trying to simplify her concept of fixed and growth mindsets, and we eagerly anticipate learning some effective strategies for improving mindsets.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Teachers and administrators share their successes with implementing Khan Academy in the math classroom. The video addresses how Khan Academy contributes in the following ways: enhances personalized learning, strengthens data-driven instruction, ensures mastery-based learning, and helps teachers engage and challenge their students with meaningful interactions.

Learning and Technology. They often are mentioned together when talking about education. Plymouth-Canton Community Schools has a history of supporting educational technology, not just the current trends, but the 'right' technology to support and enhance learning. Sounds a lot like 'Always On Learning.' It may take us awhile to get there.
One technological trend forecasting firm believes it may take the rest of the decade before we are truly collaborating globally. The 2020's will see our first use of Tangible computing.
By the end of the 2030's, education is not only Always On - it will be interconnected with every aspect of our lives. Today, Plymouth-Canton Community Schools is ready.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

DVDO's Air and Belkin's ScreenCast AV4 eliminate the hardwired link between your source devices and HDTV. Which one is worth your cash? Vancouver Canucks use 4 30K lumen Digital Projection projectors to wow fans pre and post-game... this is a sick system! Plus, All Quiet on the Western Front on beautifully restored Blu-ray!

The Belkin Tablet Stage allows for the seamless sharing of documents and three-dimensional objects with the usage of a tablet device with camera. This video demonstrates how easy it is to assemble and install your own Belkin Tablet Stage with just a few steps and simple tools. The Belkin Tablet Stage makes learning engaging for both instructors and students with the usage of just about any modern tablet. Watch the above video for a visual demonstration and visit http://belkinbusiness.com/products/b2... for more information about this product.

Glenn has been talking about the dangers of Common Core for quite some time now, and as the new standards are rolled out in more and more states, parents, students, and teachers alike are speaking out about their frustrations and concerns. On radio this morning, Glenn played the anti-Common Core plea one concerned student, Ethan Young of Farragut High School in Knox County, TN, gave at a local school board meeting in Tennessee earlier this month. What did Ethan say that had Glenn calling it “the best argument against Common Core?

“The best argument against Common Core has come in from a student, and this kid is making the case so well, honestly I can’t believe that he’s in public education,” Glenn said. “He had a group of great teachers that taught him well, and he applied himself because, if you listen to this case against Common Core, it is right on the money. And listen to the crowd because the crowd seems to be teachers. The best case we have heard… against Common Core.”

At New York City's game-based learning school Quest to Learn, sixth graders take risks in the process of designing a Rube Goldberg machine, which enables more creativity, innovation, and engagement. More resources at: http://www.edutopia.org/made-with-pla...

This video is part of the Made With Play series, a co-production with Institute of Play. Videos were made possible through generous support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

I think it's interesting in and of itself, but I also found it interesting how often he refers to "algorithms" and "mathematical modeling." I think this shows the power of algorithms, but also the need for our students to understand the algorithms, and also to understand that algorithms are first and foremost developed by humans and are not always set in stone, as when the algorithms appear to "adjust" or "learn" in the flipping sequence.
If our students can be begin to understand that algorithms don't supersede our understanding, but can help enhance it, then I think we're on the right track.

On the data center floor, cold aisle containment provides targeted cooling. This precision has many operational advantages, as we've seen. Servers are assured a consistent inlet temperature; air conditioners can achieve greater capacities; the chiller plant can become more efficient by supplying and receiving elevated water temperatures.